Samuel Gregg: ‘Benedict XVI: Reason’s Revolutionary’
Religion & Liberty Online

Samuel Gregg: ‘Benedict XVI: Reason’s Revolutionary’

Over on National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg considers what will be Pope Benedict’s last legacy:

In forthcoming weeks, there will be many commentaries on what this Pope has achieved in a relatively short time. This ranges from his efforts to root out what Ratzinger once called the “filth” of sexual deviancy that has inflicted such damage on the priesthood, his successful outreach to Catholicism’s Eastern Orthodox brothers, his generally excellent bishop appointments, to his reforms of the liturgy.

But we need to remember that Benedict XVI is arguably the most intellectual pope to sit in Peter’s Chair for centuries—even more so than his saintly predecessor, who was certainly no slouch in the world of ideas. And if there is one single thing that stands out in Benedict’s papacy, it’s this: his laser-like focus on the root-cause of the intellectual crisis that explains not only Western culture’s present wallowing in facile relativism that’s on full display in the content-free rhetoric of your average EU politician, but also the trauma that explains the violence and rage that continues to shake the Islamic world and which Islam seems incapable of resolving on its own terms.

And that problem is one of reason.

Read more . . .

Joe Carter

Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. He is the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible and co-author of How to Argue like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator (Crossway).